Flight Safety Information
April 28, 2011 - No. 086
In This Issue
Second Boeing 747-8 Intercontinental Begins Flight Test
Air France Recorder From 2009 Crash Found With `Rugged' Data Unit Missing
The future of air traffic safety...By William R. Voss
World Food Programme Aviation Safety Unit Sharjah Office organizing the 3rd
GASC in Acapulco-Mexico
Man fined after using GPS on airplane
FAA Chief Dismisses Sleep Breaks
UPS names Capozzoli as flight operations VP
Crashed An-148 was 60kt over never-exceed speed
European Association for Aviation Psychology (EAAP) International Course on
Human Factors
Second Boeing 747-8 Intercontinental Begins Flight Test
Airplane Test Program To Focus On Interior Systems
The second Boeing 747-8 Intercontinental, RC021, successfully made its first flight
Tuesday. The airplane completes the two-airplane test fleet for the 747-8
Intercontinental.
"This is another great milestone for our flight test program and shows the progress we
are making toward delivery of our passenger airplane," said Elizabeth Lund, vice
president and general manager, 747 program.
Piloted by Captains Keith Otsuka and Ron Johnston, with Ralph Chaffin serving as system
operator and Greg Lichneckert as flight analyst, RC021 took off at 0926 PDT from Paine
Field in Everett, Wash. The airplane completed a three-hour, twenty-minute flight
landing at 1246 at Paine Field. During the flight, the airplane reached an altitude of
28,000 feet and airspeed of 275 knots.
RC021 will be used primarily for testing the various interior systems that will be on the
Intercontinental, such as heating, venting and air conditioning, smoke detection and
galleys. In addition, Boeing will conduct fuel consumption and function and reliability
tests on the airplane. The 747-8 Intercontinental flight-test program will perform
approximately 600 hours of flight testing.
The passenger version of the new 747-8 will have the lowest seat-mile cost of any large
commercial jetliner, with 12 percent lower costs than its predecessor, the 747-400. The
airplane provides 16 percent better fuel economy, 16 percent less carbon emissions per
passenger and generates a 30 percent smaller noise footprint than the 747-400.
FMI: www.boeing.com
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Air France Recorder From 2009 Crash Found With `Rugged' Data Unit Missing
(Bloomberg) Investigators scouring the undersea wreckage of the 2009 Air France plane
crash located part of one of the jet's black-box recorders, which was missing the
memory unit that stores the data.
The "extraordinary" finding will help narrow the search to recover the memory module
and unravel why the plane plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, said Peter Goelz, a former
managing director at the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board who is now a
consultant at O'Neill & Associates in Washington.
"It's indestructible, like a bowling ball, able to withstand anything," Goelz said in an
interview. "If they can find it, they should be able to recover some data. And now they
know even better where to look."
France's BEA accident investigation bureau said yesterday the chassis of the recorder
was found "without the crash- survivable memory unit that contains the data." A photo
released by the BEA showed the rectangular-shaped chassis, which is a bright orange
color, upside down and partly buried in the ocean's floor with other debris nearby.
The wreckage was discovered this month off the coast of Brazil in about 3,900 meters
(12,800 feet) of water, deeper than the Titanic, where there is no natural light and
temperatures are near freezing. All 228 people on board Air France Flight 447 were killed
when the Airbus SAS A330 went down during a storm.
Cause for Optimism
"It would be fair to assume that the memory unit is somewhere in the vicinity of the
chassis, and it probably was moving at the same rate and rotation when the plane hit
the water and the parts were separated," said Richard Healing, a former NTSB member
who is now a consultant in Alexandria, Virgina. "These are pretty darn rugged devices.
There is cause for some optimism that it will be found."
While automated radio transmissions from the June 1, 2009, crash suggest the jet's
airspeed sensors failed as it flew into bad weather, leading to a series of system failures,
the BEA has said that the exact causes are unlikely to be established without the black
boxes.
The data recorder logs as many as 24 hours of several hundred parameters of flight
information including altitude and airspeed, according to Honeywell International Inc.
(HON), the manufacturer.
The units can withstand 1,500 times the force of gravity and a depth of 20,000 feet of
water for 30 days, said Bill Reavis, a spokesman for Morris Township, New Jersey-based
Honeywell. The company can't comment on the condition of the Air France recorder until
it is "fully recovered," Reavis said.
Investigators say there is no certainty the data stored by the memory modules will be
readable.
The search is continuing for the missing, cylindrical module as well as the separate
cockpit voice recorder and other parts of the twin-engine jet that may be useful to the
crash probe, the BEA said in an e-mailed statement.
BEA disclosed the discovery of the wreckage on April 3, after almost two years and four
search operations. The latest recovery effort began this week with a robotic submarine.
The data recorder was located during its first 12-hour dive, the BEA said yesterday.
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The future of air traffic safety
By William R. Voss, Special to CNN
Editor's note: William R. Voss is the president and CEO of the nonprofit Flight Safety
Foundation, located in Alexandria, Virginia.
Alexandria, Virginia (CNN) -- Events of the past few weeks have highlighted some of the
weaknesses of the U.S. air traffic control system. The human-factor element does not
always operate as planned. Some suggest that NextGen holds the answers.
NextGen is the next generation of air traffic control in the United States that promises
new levels of efficiency and safety for the national airspace. It is satellite-based, rather
than ground-based, and will be a big improvement on the current technology.
A lot of people are excited about the implementation of NextGen, and I am one of them.
It will be a wonderful change, long overdue, but there are some real concerns.
Some of the systems and software that NextGen is built on are more complicated,
challenging and vulnerable than NextGen itself. For example, it is not possible to
implement a new space-based air traffic control system on top of existing automation
systems that think the world is flat, like many of ours still do. That has to be fixed first.
New systems will also require new power systems, communication contracts and roofs
that don't leak. In a time of budget cuts, upgrading these basic components will be a
tough sell. But if we fail to address this, the fancy stuff won't work.
If it is allowed to do so, NextGen can fix political problems that affect the air traffic
control system in ways you would never believe. For instance, the airspace in the New
York City area is a mess, and that isn't just because of technology. We can trace many
of these problems back to politics.
Too many regional air traffic control centers adjoin the metropolitan airspace, each
employs many constituents and each is defended vigorously by local politicians. This
means that the airspace is cut into a series of byzantine corridors and shelves that make
little sense in a system overview. This can be fixed only with major realignment of
facilities and jobs that will be felt as far away as Oberlin, Ohio; Nashua, New Hampshire;
and Leesburg, Virginia.
I wish there were a NextGen application to deal with congressional outrage. We'll need
one when we start this process. In 2008, Bobby Sturgell, then Federal Aviation
Administration acting administrator, was trying to rationalize airspace usage, rearrange
it so it made sense, only to be subjected to vicious and persistent attacks by interest
groups and attorneys who were determined to not allow a single flight path to be moved
a single mile.
Make no mistake, NextGen will be amazing and is very necessary, but it must climb a
steep gradient to successfully summit Capitol Hill.
GPS technology making air traffic safer
While NextGen will work brilliantly if implemented as planned, when was the last time
that such a massive, human system worked as planned? We'll be able to trust the
technology, but we must be careful that it is not used in unexpected ways with
unexpected consequences.
Satellite navigation in aviation is already in common use around the world. When this
new technology was implemented, engineers predicted that the risk of a collision would
plummet because navigation would be more accurate and variations would disappear.
But they didn't consider the human factor.
In 2006, the air traffic control system in Brazil made a series of terrible separation
mistakes, and a new GOL Airlines Boeing 737 and a new Embraer corporate jet collided.
While this wasn't the first time the Brazilian air traffic control system made a mistake, it
was the first time it happened with two aircraft that could navigate accurately enough to
hit each other. Each airplane was exactly where it was supposed to be.
In the past, each aircraft's position would have varied just a little from its precise,
planned location due to built-in but minor inaccuracies in the ground-based navigation.
The implementation of new technologies made navigation more accurate but tragically
worsened the consequences of human error.
The events of the last few weeks are worrying to aviation safety professionals. With the
upcoming battle and probable introduction of NextGen, we must learn some hard lessons
from these events.
The public and the secretary of transportation decided that the way to solve problems in
our current air traffic control systems was to threaten controllers who made mistakes
with suspensions or firing. Implementing a new system is dangerous if the workforce is
hiding mistakes because of fear of retaliation.
It is far more important to use chronic but minor mistakes to identify a deeper problem,
such as irrational shift scheduling or unusual controller fatigue, and determine rational,
science-based solutions, rather than fire controllers and drive mistakes deeply
underground, unseen and unaddressed, until they emerge to create a tragedy.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of William R. Voss.
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World Food Programme Aviation Safety Unit Sharjah Office organizing the 3rd GASC in
Acapulco-Mexico
World Food Programme Aviation Safety Unit Sharjah Office organizing the 3rd GASC in
Acapulco - Mexico 3rd Global Aviation Safety Conference, Acapulco, Guerrero Mexico 19-
20 September, 2011
PRLog (Press Release) - Apr 28, 2011 - 3rd Global Aviation Safety Conference, Acapulco,
Guerrero Mexico 19-20 September, 2011
The overwhelming success of the 2nd Global Aviation Safety Conference (GASC) for
Humanitarian Air Activities has now prompted the World Food Programme WFP Aviation
Safety Unit - Sharjah office and through the kind and generous sponsorship of the
FlyMex , Rus Aviation and other sponsors, to organize the 3rd Global Aviation Safety
Conference (GASC) for Humanitarian Air Activities on September 19-20, 2011, in
Acapulco, Guerrero Mexico
The unit has sought the need to Gain a new perspectives while networking with
colleagues and industry leaders, discover what's on the horizon, discuss best practices
and keep learning about current trends and innovations, and while South America is a
new land of Aviation Safety culture for the World Food Programme we all are eagerly
looking forward to explore this opportunity.
The 3rd GASC is the precise place where addressing and reviewing the concerns and
recommendations suggested in the 2nd GASC can be situated.
This conference will be a very fertile ground to interact with the South American
Aviation industry and learn from their perspective and experience in Aviation safety. It
will give the opportunity to network with aviation colleagues, Learn about the new safety
Related priorities, strategies and initiatives, Hear leadership perspectives, Share ideas,
best practices and innovations and Discuss successes and failures.
The conference is going to be setup where the topics will address the safety of the
general aviation industry and the safety of the Humanitarian air service operations. The
scenario is put together were it has a very much interactive program in place deriving
the participants to share their ideas and input dynamically.
About World Food Programme:
The World Food Programme (WFP) is the world's largest humanitarian agency fighting
hunger worldwide. In emergencies, we get food to where it is needed, saving the lives of
victims of war, civil conflict and natural disasters. After the cause of an emergency has
passed, we use food to help communities rebuild their shattered lives.
WFP is part of the United Nations system and is voluntarily funded.
Born in 1962, WFP pursues a vision of the world in which every man, woman and child
has access at all times to the food needed for an active and healthy life. We work
towards that vision with our sister UN agencies in Rome -- the Food and Agriculture
Organisation (FAO) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) -- as
well as other government, UN and NGO partners.
In 2010 we aimed to reach more than 90 million people with food assistance in 73
countries.
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Man fined after using GPS on airplane
WINNIPEG - A 73-year-old man arrested after he repeatedly ignored a flight crew's
demands to stop using his Global Positioning System device has been fined $250.
Michel Jules Ego was arrested in Winnipeg on Tuesday after arriving on a flight from
Minneapolis and spent the night in jail.
He pleaded guilty to one count of failing to comply with safety instructions of an air crew
-- specifically failing to fasten his seatbelt and remain seated.
Prosecutors stayed a second charge in relation to the GPS.
Ego is a resident of Saint Denis, Reunion Island, located in the Indian Ocean east of
Madagascar. Court heard he was in Winnipeg to visit his daughter.
Ego continued to use his GPS device on the aircraft despite repeated warnings it was
against safety regulations, said Crown attorney Roxanne Gagne.
Ego told court he was a pilot and routinely used his GPS when flying.
That didn't excuse Ego from complying with flight crew instructions, said Judge Lee Anne
Martin.
http://www.torontosun.com/2011/04/27/man-fined-after-using-gps-on-airplane
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FAA Chief Dismisses Sleep Breaks
FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt is dismissing calls to allow controllers to sleep during
shifts to mitigate the effects of fatigue.
The agency is currently reviewing 12 recommendations to offset fatigue proposed by the
National Air Traffic Controllers Association that include breaks of up to 2.5 hours,
reduced work hours on certain rotations and increased training on the effects of sleep
deprivation and disorders.
Critics of FAA's current staffing policy have blamed the agency's refusal to acknowledge
sleep breaks as a solution to fatigue for a series of embarrassing incidents involving
controllers sleeping on duty. National Transportation Safety Board member Mark
Rosekind also has endorsed the use of short naps, which he says have been scientifically
shown to boost performance.
Babbitt, however, dismisses calls that sleeping be allowed. "We are not going to have
people sleeping at work," he told reporters April 27 at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's
10th Annual Aviation Summit in Washington.
The NATCA recommendations, produced by a joint union/FAA working group, do not call
for naps during shifts, instead proposing recuperative breaks.
"As fatigue can occur at any time and on any shift, the introduction of a recuperative
break during a shift can mitigate the risk of reduced cognitive performance due to
fatigue," says the recommendation.
http://www.aviationweek.com
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UPS names Capozzoli as flight operations VP
UPS Airlines has appointed Matt Capozzoli as vice president of flight operations.
Capozzoli, a 34-year company veteran, has served UPS at several managerial,
operational, legal as well as ground operational positions.
He will replace Rick Barr at the position. Barr is retiring after 23 years of service, says
UPS.
Source: Air Transport Intelligence news
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Crashed An-148 was 60kt over never-exceed speed
Russian investigators have concluded that the Antonov An-148 which crashed while on a
test flight in early March was travelling some 60kt above its never-exceed speed when it
broke up.
The industry and trade ministry has released part of the final report from the
investigation committee, following the 5 March accident, which states that the crew
inadvertently allowed the twinjet to accelerate beyond design speed while demonstrating
an emergency descent manoeuvre.
It states that the aircraft was 110km/h (59kt) over this limit at the time. This led to
structural deformation and the "emergence of low-frequency vibrations in all axes".
The ministry states: "The result was the destruction of aircraft in the air, followed by its
collision with the ground."
Acknowledging that the speed indication on the aircraft's cockpit display was incorrect, at
flight regimes outside of normal operation, the ministry nevertheless says the crew
demonstrated lack of co-ordination and "untimely and inadequate actions".
None of the six occupants survived the accident, south of airframer VASO's plant in
Voronezh.
Sources within the investigating committee tell ATI that the incorrect speed indications
had been detected by the An-148's built-in health-monitoring system during previous
flights but, for undetermined reasons, had not attracted attention.
Language problems on board the aircraft, which was being demonstrated to Myanmar air
force representatives, also exacerbated the situation.
Antonov has introduced changes to software dealing with flight-parameter indications,
but no mandatory modifications to the twinjet have been prescribed.
Source: Air Transport Intelligence news
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European Association for Aviation Psychology (EAAP) International Course on Human
Factors in Flight Safety, Safety Management Systems, Risk Management and Safety
Investigation, 2011.
Dr Rob Lee, Kristina Pollack and Brent Hayward will be conducting two of their popular
EAAP-recognized "Human Factors in Flight Safety, Safety Management Systems, Risk
Management and Safety Investigation" courses in 2011.
The first of these courses was conducted at the European Commission Joint Research
Centre at Ispra, Italy in 1999.
Since then, these EAAP courses have been continually updated to reflect the many
changes in the aviation industry. They have been held regularly, in locations including
Eurocontrol, Luxembourg; the SAS Flight Academy, Stockholm; Iberia Airlines, Madrid;
NAV Portugal, Lisbon; the Swiss Air Force, Interlaken; and, Emirates, Dubai.
A total of more than 250 participants, both civil and military, have attended these highly
regarded courses.
This year, the 14th of these courses will be held in Dubai, UAE, from 05-09 June 2011,
kindly hosted by Emirates Airline.
The 15th course will be held the following week, between 13-18 June, in Dublin, Ireland,
kindly hosted by Aer Lingus.
Both courses will be open to all interested parties.
Both courses will offer reduced registration fees for EAAP members, as well as a
significant additional "Early Bird" discount for those who register and pay by mid-May
2011.
Detailed information on the course content and its instructors, together with Registration
Brochures for both the Dublin and Dubai courses can now be downloaded from the EAAP
website: www.eaap.net/courses.html
Curt Lewis, P.E., CSP
CURT LEWIS & ASSOCIATES, LLC